Over the past decade, there have been, by my count, six attempted terrorist incidents on board a commercial airliner than landed in or departed from the United States: the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11, the shoe bomber incident in December 2001, and the NWA flight 253 incident on Christmas.

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics provides a wealth of statistical information on air traffic. For this exercise, I will look at both domestic flights within the US, and international flights whose origin or destination was within the United States. I will not look at flights that transported cargo and crew only. I will look at flights spanning the decade from October 1999 through September 2009 inclusive (the BTS does not yet have data available for the past couple of months).

Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.

These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 mles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.

Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.

There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.

Friday, December 25

Obama baffles observers, I suspect, because he’s an ideologue and a pragmatist all at once. He’s a doctrinaire liberal who’s always willing to cut a deal and grab for half the loaf. He has the policy preferences of a progressive blogger, but the governing style of a seasoned Beltway wheeler-dealer.

[..] Absent political constraints, Obama would probably side with the liberal line on almost every issue. It’s just that he’s more acutely conscious of the limits of his powers and less willing to start fights that he might lose than many supporters would prefer. In this regard, he most resembles Ronald Reagan and Edward Kennedy. Both were highly ideological politicians who trained themselves to work within the system. Both preferred cutting deals to walking away from the negotiating table.

Growing up Jewish, I was very bitter about Christmas. And for everyone saying, “Well, you have Hanukah!” No. Hanukah is not the same. You don’t even get off of school for Hanukah, and it’s mostly about your parents giving you a present to shut you up so you won’t complain about being Jewish during Christmas and possibly convert later in life. There are hardly any Hanukah songs, and the ones we’ve got sound sort of like death hymns. If you’re lucky, you get, like, one non-denominational snowman decoration hung up, but he’s usually wearing a red and green scarf. Even Frosty loves Jesus, and he doesn’t even have a soul. Or legs.

I remember having a major crisis when I realized that Santa was only going to visit the Christian boys and girls. That seemed wholly unfair; why should they get free presents just because of their religion? Isn’t that discriminatory? So I asked my parents about the whole Santa Claus thing. They confided that there was no Santa, but I shouldn’t tell my Christian friends.

That is the moment that I realized I had the power to hold something over the other children at school, torture them mercilessly, and kill their childhood by revealing that there really wasn’t a Santa. It was the ultimate retort in any situation. You don’t want to play four square with me? Well, fuck you, there’s no Santa, it’s just your parents.

You say you sat on Santa Claus’s lap at the mall? Nope, that was just an unemployed fat guy in a red suit. Oh, your precious Santa Claus is going to come down the chimney and bring you lots of wonderful presents for being such a good girl? Think about the logistics of that. How is he going to come to every house in the whole world in one night? Even if he skips my house, he’s still got like a billion more to go. As fat as that guy is, I feel like running around so much after sitting on his chunky ass all year is just a recipe for a heart attack. Or is that what you wanted for Christmas, Sally? A big, smelly Santa corpse of your very own?

Inevitably, these conversations ended in tears as I watched my classmate’s sweet naiveté die, but at least I felt better about myself.

No wonder people hate the Jews. Pass the latkes!

A digger adds:

My Brother-in-laws family is very religious. Their son told my son there is no SANTA. My son then told their son there is no GOD. I guess we are even.

France's ruling party says it plans to present a bill to parliament next month, which would ban the wearing of full Islamic veils in all public places. The party says the move should be seen as "a law of liberation."

As a French/American dual citizen, I have a possibly different perspective on this.

If this were the United States, I would be very much against this law, for entirely libertarian reasons. The United States is a nation of immigrants, and while there are always various groups trying to claim that their particular immigrant culture is somehow more "American" than someone else's (witness anti-Hispanic sentiment, for example, or the number of people that think that English ought to be legislated as the national language, or whatever) for the most part the concensus that thankfully eventually emerges is that unless you're Native American, you can stuff it -- your particular culture has no particular monopoly on what it means to be American, and no amount of whining will change that.

France, on the other hand, is not America. Unlike the United States, it is not a country of immigrants. There is such a thing, fair or not, as "French culture", and without making any sort of value judgment here, full-veil mandating sects of Islam do not qualify.

France has been relatively willing, despite not being founded on the principles the US was founded on, to welcome immigrants from other countries. Much of this perhaps was not altruistic, but rather fallout from France's ill-advised forays into colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Certainly much of France's muslim population are in France now because they fought for France in the Franco-Algerian war in the 1960s and were forced to abandon their homes essentially because they chose the wrong side in that war -- something that France has been terrible about recognizing, frankly.

But I guess what I'm saying is that ultimately, the sort of "cultural chauvinism" that we have great disdain for here in the United States -- which this law would be an example of, in my opinion -- is a bit different in France (and in the rest of Europe, too). European nations have histories dating back millenia, they didn't develop their cultural heritage by melting together the traditions of myriad peoples over the last 250 years. That mixed character is precisely what makes the United States great, but the whole world is not the US.

Ultimately, if France decides that it wants to draw the line somewhere, if they decide that they want to be a secular society and that they don't like the symbolism they feel the veil represents, why shouldn't they ban it?

It's their country, after all -- and "they", unlike Americans, are a well-defined group.

After months in which the Senate health care bill was held up over efforts to find some form in which she would agree to sign on to it, Sen. Snowe (R-ME) now says she will oppose it because it is being "rushed."

There are cogent reasons to oppose the Senate's health bill. Being "rushed" stopped being one back in September-October.

My suspicion is that Snowe would like to support the bill at this point but doesn't have the patience to deal with the Full Metal Malkinization that would ensue from the right.

On May 19th, 2005, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars. This Panoramic Camera mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the rover's 489th martian day, or sol. Spirit was commanded to stay awake briefly after sending that sol's data to the Mars Odyssey orbiter just before sunset. The image is a false color composite, showing the sky similar to what a human would see, but with the colors slightly exaggerated.

Fact: if the NSA were to detect the presence of a malicious worm or destructive virus on a U.S. Internet server targeted at a bank, perhaps stealing money from that bank, it could do nothing but warn the bank. The bank, most likely, does not have the capacity to deal with the worm itself; the NSA does not have the legal authority to employ methods to screen out the bad code, even though it has the technological capability. You can employ any type of thought of experiment you want here. Entities like utility companies and banks often rely on overtaxed communications networks to assess their performance; those communications networks are extraordinarily vulnerable because they rely on vulnerable machines -- machines that are old and were built with technology that, in many instances, originated elsewhere. The backbone of the Internet itself is very fragile; the VeriSign corporation, which essentially runs the Net, deals with thousands of attacks per day, some of them harmless, some of them dangerous, some of them from state actors (like China), others from well-funded and savvy techno-terrorists.

This is a tech problem and a law problem. Congress is trying to come up with ways to designate certain types of corporations that are responsible for large segments of some major activity -- power generation, money transferring, information sharing -- as, essentially, too big to fail -- or be shut down -- by cyber intruders. The idea, in essence, would be to require these entities to submit to a cyber audit. In the event of a major attack, the government (actually, the Department of Homeland Security, using NSA technology) would have the authority to quarantine the problem until it was removed. As you might imagine, this approach raises hackles with a lot of people. The corporations resist the idea of government intrusion. Their CFOs don't see the risk, so they're not interested in spending money to preemptively solve the problem. Civil libertarians properly ask about oversight; who's going to watch the watchers? Technologists wonder whether there aren't other ways to protect the nation's information grid from systemic threats.
(cont.)

Friday, December 11

"Swiss voters underestimated the impact on religious liberty when they voted to ban minaret construction. But Muslims whose nations persecute Christians, Jews, and other religious minorities have no standing to complain. The Islamic world needs to respect religious liberty at home before lecturing the West about intolerance, racism, hatred and Islamophobia."

The College Football Playoff Act of 2009 would ban promoting, marketing or advertising a "national championship game" unless the game is part of a single-elimination playoff tournament like the National Football League playoffs. The bill threatens to hold college football's governing body in violation of Federal Trade Commission truth-in-advertising provisions.

At this point my > 50% odds scenario is that we get something like the present Senate bill with its subsidies, excise tax, no denials for preexisting conditions nor recissions, the FEHBP-like national nonprofit on exchanges, no public option, no Medicare buy-ins, and it passes with Snowe's vote. That could be 61 for cloture, but I would bet on 60 without Ben Nelson.

Not a happy day for those of us on the right, but a small enough pill that I won't be gagging.

And it'll sure be a relief to finally have this health reform hoopla behind us.

NYT: "one in eight Americans and one in four children" receive food stamps.

I suppose that if we were to replace all welfare with a negative income tax, as I advocate, some of the resulting tax credit for low earners could be provided in the form of food stamps if we're worried that too much of the money is wasted on non-food items.

The problem with your reader's simplification of the AGW deniers' argument is that he's speaking very generally and generously about one small battalion in a broad coalition of deniers.

We have the supposedly literate folks like George Will who don't understand what a trend is, and therefore they think the Earth has been cooling since 1998, ergo AGW is a hoax. Then we have the folks who think that the Earth may indeed be warming, but it's not because of human activity, or if it is, the absolute proof hasn't been found yet. Then we have the folks who think that it's too late, too hard, and too expensive to do anything about it, so, oh well, we'll deal with it and we'll "evolve." Then we have the Christian right, which thinks that God sets the thermostat, period, and scientists are evil ghouls who bring about things like the Holocaust. Then there are the worshipers of "common sense" who think it's a stroke of genius to say things like "carbon dioxide only makes up a tiny percentage of the atmosphere." And let's not forget the paranoid viral email forwarders who think that the East Anglia story is evidence of a genuine conspiracy fronted by Al Gore that seeks to make money by setting up carbon offset programs. And on and on and on.

It's a vast army of millions that is supported by the apathy of millions of others who, understandably, don't know what to think. The common bond is denial, and the common goal is to do absolutely zilch to change our habits.

Bold is my flavor. I further suspect that models of warming's deleterious effects are more uncertain and exaggerated than those sounding the alarm will admit, and am also not fully convinced temperatures are at a significant high compared to a millenia ago (pre-Little Ice Age).

I'm not against a Pigovian framework to reduce unnecessary emissions, but I insist that it be done in an economically efficient manner so that we're not wasting resources and can be sure it passes cost-benefit muster. There are worse things than doing nothing--a convoluted giveaway to special interests like Waxman-Markey, for instance.

"If the people that believed the moon landing was staged on a movie lot had access to unlimited money from large carbon polluters or some other special interest who wanted to confuse people into thinking that the moon landing didn't take place, I'm sure we'd have a robust debate about it right now." —Al Gore

Well there are other differences. No one is proposing drastic economic changes on the basis of the moon landings being faked. You can't pin the entire debate on people with a particularly strong vested interest in pollution (say, oil and coal companies). There are other things at stake.

This is why it ought to be an embarrassment to exclaim in horror that the U.S. may be “falling behind” in the development of green technology. It is rather more illuminating to see government subsidies to research and the development of speculative technology as contributions to a collective global effort to explore the space of technological possibility.

The expected return to the average German taxpayer from German state science and technology subsidies is probably negative. But the global citizen’s expected return to global investment is probably positive. And the more others invest, the more positive the expected return is. If some Taiwanese firm makes an enormous breakthrough, everyone will get to internalize the benefit of this new technology. We just don’t know in advance if the Germans or the Taiwanese or the Canadians or the Americans or whoever will make the discovery.

This kind of global cooperation sounds nice, doesn’t it? But we know all about games like this, don’t we? If Canada, say, puts an end to all state subsidies for science and tech, this really won’t much affect the probability of a major efficiency-enhancing discovery somewhere or other. Which implies that the average Canadian taxpayer, now paying for no national R&D subsidies, would see her expected return from international R&D subsidies go up.(And the greater the extent to which subsidies tend to go to the best subsidy-seekers rather than to the best innovators, the less taxpayers should worry about the downside of withdrawing their state’s support from the global effort of discovery.)

As a general rule, if nothing bad will happen to you if you free ride, it’s smart to free ride. Worrying that other countries are pulling ahead is like worrying that the other oarsman in your boat will beat you to the destination if you’re lazy. You’re in the same boat! The smart thing is to goad everyone else into going as fast and hard as they can. For a good while now, America has been a dim kid with ape strength happy to carry half the world as long as he gets to fist-pump, flex his pecs, and chant U.S.A.! U.S.A.! in the mirror each night. It’s a darn good deal for the rest of the world. America’s just too dumb to feel exploited. And too idiotically vain to enjoy a free ride.

Commenter nickbacklash goes further:

Worth noting though that, according to a fairly quietly released OECD study, state R&D subsidies don't make any net contribution to technological innovation, explained in this talk by Terence Kealey.

Science is not a standard public good. Not that this invalidates your wider point, there is just an even better reason for not [publicly] investing in R&D.

Physically challenged Chinese swimmer Xuqing Jin dived into the pool as he competed in the men’s 400-meter relay race at the Basavanagudi Aquatic Centre in Bangalore on Tuesday. More than 800 athletes from 43 countries are participating in the weeklong International Wheelchair and Amputee Sports Federation’s World Games. (Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP/Getty Images)

QUADRIPLEGIC HUNTER: James Cap, a quadriplegic since a 1979 high school football accident, held the tube in his mouth that he uses to aim and fire his shotgun in a shed where he hunts in Manville, N.J., Tuesday. Mr. Cap recently won a court battle to use the contraption.

Created as an afterthought and initially intended as a low-profile congressional calculation service, the CBO has quietly risen to a place of unique prominence and power in Washington policy debates. Widely cited and almost universally respected, it is treated as judge and referee, resolving disputes about what policies will cost and how they will work.

But the agency’s authority is belied by the highly speculative nature of its work, which requires an endless succession of unverifiable assumptions. These assumptions are frequently treated as definitive, as if on faith. In practice, this means the CBO is not merely an impartial legislative scorekeeper but a keeper of the nation’s budgetary myths, a clan of spreadsheet-wielding priests whose declarations become Washington’s holy writ.
(cont.)

Senate Democrats have reached a "broad agreement" on a health reform bill, Majority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday night — a plan that would replace the public option in the current Senate bill with a new national insurance plan offered by private insurers, and a chance for older Americans to “buy in” to Medicare.

How about also giving the rest of us a chance to opt out of Medicare?

I would gladly free the state from my future Medicare entitlements in exchange for being allowed the courtesy of keeping my own damn wages.

Why do progressives want to give us the option to opt in to more government insurance, but never out of it? And tell me again how these expansions of government health insurance are something other than incrementalism towards single-payer Medicare-for-all?

Anyhow, to the first part of the agreement: private national (as opposed to state-specific) insurance plans sounds great to me.

Nate Silver doesn't have much to report yet, but what he does say is amusing:

It's been a long 20 hours or so in various sorts of planes, trains and lines. I'm used to keeping a relatively, uh, abstract schedule, but the overnight flight left a little bit too early for me to be tired, and then by the time I was getting tired, it was light out, and now -- even though it's just 2:30 PM here -- it's already about to get dark again.

The conference, at this point, feels more like a trade show than a political event, but it's cool to be surrounded by so many people from all over the world -- imagine the international terminal at JFK, but with even worse food and people walking by in giant tree costumes.

I did have a good conversation with a couple of Brits while waiting in line for my NGO badge. They were very bright and keyed in -- they run a green taxi company in London -- but I was surprised at how confusing they found American politics to be. How can the Senate require 60 percent to pass something? How can Delaware have as many senators as New York? What's up with the whole electoral college thing? How can Obama go from 70 percent popularity to 50 percent in a half a year? Could Sarah Palin really become President someday? The Guardian, among others, has some very good Washington coverage, but I think there's an opportunity for one of the UK dailies to provide a Washington column that's specifically geared toward a British or European audience: we tend to take for granted how freakin' weird our politics can be to the rest of the world.

In 2009, the average employer-sponsored health-care plan cost a bit less than $13,500. But virtually no one cut a check for $13,500. Employers generally pay more than 70 percent of their employees' health-care costs. To employees, that seems like a good deal, particularly given how fast costs are growing. A "benefit," as it's called.

But health-care coverage is not a benefit. It's a wage deduction. When premium costs go up, wages go down. When premium costs go down, wages go up. Yet workers don't know that. In fact, the information is hidden from them. That means that cost control seems like all pain and no gain, which makes it virtually impossible for Congress to pass. It's like asking someone to diet when they don't realize it will help them lose weight.

Cost control is not, in fact, all pain and no gain. It's some pain in return for a fat raise. A 2006 study, for instance, by Harvard's Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra used malpractice payments to estimate the effect of premium increases on wages. They found that a 10 percent increase in health-care premiums "results in an offsetting decrease in wages of 2.3 percent" and an increase in unemployment of 1.2 percentage points. Compensation is basically a set sum for employers, and they don't seem to care much whether it goes into wages or into health-care costs.

Workers saw this in the 1990s. This was the era of the managed-care revolution, which most remember as a horrifying failure. Famously, audiences applauded when Helen Hunt broke out into a profanity-laden rant against HMOs in the movie "As Good as It Gets." The popular backlash was so intense that by the turn of the century the managed-care experiment was virtually over. The problem with this historic failure? The data showed the experiment to be a tremendous success.

From 1989 to 1995, median wages actually fell a bit. Then, managed care kicked in. Annual growth in health-care costs fell from more than 10 percent in the early 1990s to less than 5 percent in the late '90s. Meanwhile, wages shot through the roof, rising more than 11 percent from 1995 to 2000. Then we ended the managed-care experiment, and health-care costs resumed their normal speed of growth. Predictably, wages slumped back down from 2000 to 2006. "By every observable indicator," says Harvard's David Cutler, "managed care was a huge success. It cut spending, cut the growth of spending and didn't seem to kill anyone. And yet everyone hated it."

Of course they hated it. They didn't see its benefits, only its costs. They knew they were suddenly trapped in networks and being hassled by their insurers. As for their raises, those were nice, but why are you changing the subject?

When Americans rejected managed care, in other words, they didn't know they were ending wage increases, too. But since 1990, wages have tracked changes in premiums more closely than they've tracked the growth of GDP. Maybe if more workers knew that, they would be more interested in efforts to control health-care costs.

And adds on his blog:

The column ends by summarizing some ideas that have already been rejected (Ron Wyden's Free Choice Act, Chuck Grassley's proposal to add health-care costs to W-2 forms), and proposes one idea that should be added to the bill: "attach health-care costs to each paycheck. If employers listed the cost of health care alongside the bite taken by payroll taxes, it would be much clearer to workers that health-care coverage was coming out of their wages, not out of their employer's largess."

One of the lessons of this health-care reform process has been that cost control is extremely hard, in part because few of the system's participants really see an upside. Neither workers nor Medicare beneficiaries nor Medicaid recipients feel the full cost of their insurance coverage. Clarifying the connection between the cost of health care and, say, wages, would do a lot to make clear that cost control isn't just sacrifice. It's a trade, and you get something in return. That, in turn, would make cost control an easier lift next time. And there will be a next time, and health-care reform should be designed to make it easier.

Hiding health insurance from wages and calling it a "benefit" serves no purpose other than to increase the power of health providers, insurance companies, unions, and to some extent employers.

"Australia refused to give Rebellion's new Aliens Vs. Predator game a rating, effectively banning it in the country. Rebellion says it won't be submitting an edited version for another round of classifications, however. (As Valve did with Left 4 Dead 2.) They said, 'We will not be releasing a sanitized or cut down version for territories where adults are not considered by their governments to be able to make their own entertainment choices.'"

Sunday, December 6

Atheists have always been a minority. Religious minorities are frequently in an awkward position, particularly when the majority considers their very existence to be a challenge. So atheists have tended to keep quiet, sometime not even realizing that the person they are speaking to is another atheist.

The internet has alleviated some of this problem. First it provides a semi-anonymity, which allows people to speak freely. Second, it’s created a way for people who are geographically spread around the world to meet together and discuss. So the internet provides something of a support group, which makes the atheists stronger and more confident. This also produces a group polarization effect, which makes the stronger atheists more confrontational.

So when folks like Dawkins came along, there was a ready made audience for their work. The success of The God Delusion helped get other atheist works published, creating the wave of “New Atheists” we see today.

I remained a theist in 1999. Without internet access to open my mind over the past decade, I might still be one. Or at least the transition would've been slower.

Over three months in 2006, as her five children grew more emaciated and listless by the day, Estelle Walker made no move to find a job, no effort to scrounge up a meal, her kids told a jury yesterday.

"We were supposed to wait for God to provide," said Walker's oldest daughter, now 21. "And that's what we did."

At one point, the daughter said, she and her siblings went 11 days without food. When police were at last summoned to the Sussex County cabin by neighbors, investigators found the children so malnourished they had difficulty talking.

[..] they said Walker never tried to get any assistance for her family, either from her estranged husband or from other relatives. She likewise avoided seeking help from two churches near the Hopatcong cabin where they had been staying, the children said.
Though she had previously worked as a teacher, Walker made no effort to earn money, her children said.

"She never tried to get money or food or get a job," the 16-year-old daughter said.

In 2005, Walker and the children -- then ages 8, 9, 11, 13 and 18 -- had been placed in the cabin by their church, Times Square Church of Manhattan, to help them escape what Walker claimed was her husband's alcoholism. The cabin is owned by church members who open it for retreats.

Walker was due to leave the cabin in May 2006 but refused, saying God had told her to stay, church members have said. The church then cut off her support and began eviction proceedings.

The invocation of God has been a theme throughout the trial's first three days. Before the jury entered the courtroom yesterday, public defender Ronald Nicola told Judge N. Peter Conforti that Walker had been refusing to take an active role in her defense.

"She says, "God is my defense,' Nicola told the judge. [..] Asked by Conforti why she is not participating in her trial, Walker told him she saw no point in it.

"I don't feel the need to continue to go over the documents that we've been going over for three years," she said. "God will defend me."

[..] Last year, Walker rejected a plea-bargain offer that would have required no additional incarceration other than the one year she already served in the county jail, if she agreed to undergo additional psychiatric testing.

WASHINGTON—In what is being touted by the Labor Department as extremely positive news, the nation's available labor rate has reached double digits for the first time in 26 years, bringing the total number of potentially employable Americans to an impressive 15.7 million.
Enlarge Image Solis

"This is such an exciting time to be an employer in America," said Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, adding that every single day 6,500 more citizens join America's growing possible workforce. "There's such a massive and diverse pool of job-ready Americans to choose from. And each month the number only gets higher."

"While our current available labor rate of 10.2 percent isn't quite as robust as it was in 1982 or 1933, we're happy to say that reaching that benchmark is no longer out of the realm of possibility," Solis continued.

According to the Department of Labor's report, nearly 200,000 more Americans suddenly became fully hirable in October alone. And November saw unprecedented gains in the number of high-quality auto workers, teachers, lawyers, part-time retailers, and even doctors who could be employed.

Two years ago, Matthew White searched Limewire for porn. He was looking for 'College Girls Gone Wild,' but ended up downloading some images of child pornography. This was accidental, according to White, and he quickly deleted the images. A year later, the FBI showed up on his family's doorstep and asked to search the computer. After thorough sleuthing, the FBI found some images 'deep within the hard drive.' According to White, the investigators agreed that he himself could not have accessed the files anymore. Matthew now faces 20 years in jail for possession of child pornography. On advice from his lawyer, he intends to plead guilty so that he will 'hopefully' end up with 3.5 years in jail, 10 years probation and a registration as a sex offender. 'The FBI could not comment on this specific case, but said if child pornography is ever downloaded accidentally, the user needs to call authorities immediately. They may confiscate your computer, but it's better than the alternative.'"

Friday, December 4

Breaking a three-day stalemate, the Senate approved an amendment to its health care legislation that would require insurance companies to offer free mammograms and other preventive services to women.

The vote was 61 to 39, with three Republicans joining 56 Democrats and the two independents in favor.

This happened directly after the release of evidence showing that many mammograms do not pass a comparative effectiveness test. Once the test became a public issue at all...well, now you see what happens. CBO, take note.

A real market in consumer-driven health plans and HSAs remains the only effective health reform, but nobody's listening.

Instead Democrats are on the cusp of passing more mandated coverage and increasing subsidies to the system they've broke (to no small extent with similar mandated coverages or "patients' bill of rights" at the state level). This of course is in addition to the other market distortions like tax credits for employer-based healthcare and spreading the stigma that employers should be responsible for the (grossly inefficient practice) of negotiating for their employees' health plans.

Herein lay Democrats' political power: they keep breaking the market and then promise to save you from its evil.

Thursday, December 3

The situation is much more complicated than it seems and definitely too complicated for Sarah Palin to understand. The war in Afghanistan is not one that can be "won". I think the Obama administration still understands the situation better than the Republicans. We are seeing changes in their way of dealing with us. When Hillary Clinton came to Pakistan, although her visit was short still she utilized it pretty well. She did a number of debates with our top journalists on tv who asked many difficult and critical questions. The way she answered them and took all the questios and criticism tactfully and gave replies to them was wonderful. I myself watched many of her interviews on TV. She went to a number of mosques and shrines. She showed her respect by covering her head going there. These are the things that mean a lot to the common man here. For me, it was a refreshing change that she pronounced “Pakistan” correctly unlike other Americans.

The aid that is coming from America, for the first time is going to non-governmental organizations instead of the pockets of our corrupt politicians. They will get some part of it but the fact that any part of it will be going directly to NGOs too is amazing. Although the common man can still not be won by just these measures as the history of mistrust goes back to decades but these measures still do at least some pat in easing the tension. Increasing troops in Afghanistan might help a little but you need to understand that Pakistan is at the center-stage of this whole drama. Some Taliban in Afghanistan are locals but most of them are foreigners and we all know that a huge number of them come from Pakistan who are trained at here. Whenever the America launches a full scale military offensive against them, they just come here to Pakistan which they consider a safe haven and as soon as things get better there they go back.

Even if they are stopped from escaping to Pakistan by tighter border control and lets say all of the Taliban are killed in Afghanistan, more will be recruited from these same madrassahs and extremist training camps from Pakistan. America keeps launching drone attacks from time to time in our tribal areas which have been effective but have caused a large number of civilian casualties as well. What needs to be done is better intelligence services and attacking the militant safe havens and training grounds in Pakistan secretly in association with Pakistani government. This goal can be achieved with the help of American intelligence agencies. It is true that Pakistani government needs to do more in fighting these terrorists. Unfortunately our politicians are just as bad as the military dictators. I do believe that the government in some ways is trying to make things bad here to get more aid from America which obviously wont go to the people but to the pockets of the politicians themselves.

Some people do believe that some or even most of the bomb blasts in Pakistan are actually arranged by the government so they can show to the world and especially America that “look what Taliban have done and what they are capable of and what they can do to you also, so give us more and more money in aid and funds that we can use to fight Taliban”. Most of the money in fact goes to their own pocket and little goes to do what it was given for. The government of Afghanistan lead by Hamid Karzai is also very corrupt. He is sometimes called the “the corruption king”. Until more schools and hospitals and factories and jobs are created in Afghanistan and the quality of life of afghans is improved , no real change can come. Sometimes they become Taliban because that’s the only option they have. Also there are a number of madrassahs still operating in Pakistan who turn regular people who just want to get knowledge about Islam into terrorists. Even in a lot of mosques, the Friday sermon is more America bashing speeches than anything related to Islam. There are religious shows and channels on TV that preach extremist ideology and urge people to take up arms.

Nothing is being done about them by the Pakistani government . All that is very important, because nobody can deny Pakistan’s role in the war that is going in Afghanistan. There is a lot of social unrest here in Pakistan. The poverty, unemployment and inflation are out of control. People are selling their children and committing suicide because they cannot provide for their families. It is much easier to persuade a person like that to take up arms to go on a “road to heaven” than someone who actually has some part of his/her life in control. Our mullahs come in all shapes and sizes, hair styles, beard styles and clothing to cater to the religious needs of all social strata. It is more like a business. The other day a more modern looking mullah on TV with a shorter beard and a pant suit with few sentences of English sprinkled here and there in his speech was urging young people to India as it was the prophecy of prophet Muhammad. This is so frustrating that these type of psychos are allowed to spread their message of hate and war on TV with no restrictions.

So America should urge Pakistani government to do something about these mullahs and madrasshas and TV channels also who are misleading people, recruiting more Taliban and making things worse for America in Afghanistan.

Remember too that when you have a progressive tax system, especially when there are surcharges on people making seven-figure incomes, you also have a system where for any given level of national income, the greater the inequality, the greater the government’s tax revenues. And indeed federal revenues have been rising faster than median wages for decades now, thanks to the rich getting ever richer.

Given the government’s insatiable appetite for cash, it’s only natural that it would prefer to tax plutocrats, spending some of that money on poorer Americans, rather than move to a world where poorer Americans earn more (but still don’t pay that much in taxes), and the plutocrats earn less, depriving the national fisc of untold billions in revenue.

The government’s interests, then, are naturally aligned with those of the plutocrats — and when that happens, the chances of change naturally drop to zero.

Tuesday, December 1

Monday, November 30

I’ve waited a bit on this one to see how it would shake out. The hacked/leaked emails and data seemed to me like prime fodder for motivated cognition. My expectations were pretty much met. Many alarmists have inappropriately minimized the importance of the evidence of a shameful conspiracy to enforce what is clearly an ideological party line among climate researchers. Many skeptics have gone too far in using the revelations as grounds for casting doubt on the entire scientific case for AGW. But, clearly, the thrust of the scandal vindicates the skeptics’ claims that the science of climate change is conducted in an ideologically charged atmosphere, that there really are coordinated attempts to suppress or marginalize studies and scholars out of step with the favored narrative, and that there really are coordinated attempts to make evidence in favor of the favored narrative look better than it really is.

The scientific implications of the Climategate files are probably small, but the political implication is certainly large–because of the politicized nature of climate science confirmed by the files. Verification of the existence of conspiring enforcers of orthodoxy weakens the strongest rhetorical weapon in the alarmist arsenal. The idea that the science behind predictions of potentially catastrophic warming is rock solid and that the putative scientific consensus reflects the rock solidity of the science licenses the inference that there is no scientifically respectable excuse for skepticism of or disagreement with the consensus. That is a big stick to thump people with. But the Climategate files strongly suggest that at least some of the science is not rock solid and that the scientific consensus is at least in part the product of silencing or marginalizing those who might upset it. The files have made “How can we be sure that you did not fudge your data” and “How do we know that dissenting voices have been given a fair hearing?” questions that we now must ask rather than questions skeptics can be effectively shouted down for asking. The files show that suspicion is warranted. That’s a big deal.

It is not surprising to see a “Move along! Nothing to see here!” response from alarmists, but there is certainly something to see. Though I’m sure some ideologues will merely amp up their armtwisting thug tactics to protect the fragile perception of consensus they had achieved (precioussssssss!), I predict that the overall response from the scientific community will be healthy and invigorating. Climate science will become more transparent and more rigorously by-the-book because climate scientists are becoming more fully aware that the impulse to jealously protect a public perception of consensus can undermine itself by producing questionable science and a justifiably skeptical public.

For a species low in male parental investment, the basic dynamic of courtship, as we've seen, is pretty simple: the male really wants sex; the female isn't so sure. She may want time to (unconsciously) assess the quality of his genes, whether by inspecting him or by letting him battle with other males for her favor. She may also pause to weigh the chances that he carries disease. And she may try to extract a precopulation gift, taking advantage of the high demand for her eggs. This "nuptial offering"—which technically constitutes a tiny male parental investment, since it nourishes her and her eggs—is seen in a variety of species, ranging from primates to black-tipped hanging flies. (The female hanging fly insists on having a dead insect to eat during sex. If she finishes it before the male is finished, she may head off in search of another meal, leaving him high and dry. If she isn't so quick, the male may repossess the leftovers for subsequent dates.) These various female concerns can usually be addressed fairly quickly; there's no reason for courtship to drag on for weeks.

But now throw high MPI into the equation—male investment not just at the time of sex, but extending up to and well beyond birth. Suddenly the female is concerned not only with the male's genetic investment, or with a free meal, but with what he'll bring to the offspring after it materializes. In 1989 the evolutionary psychologist David Buss published a pioneering study of mate preferences in thirty-seven cultures around the world. He found that in every culture, females placed more emphasis than males on a potential mate's financial prospects.

That doesn't mean women have a specific, evolved preference for wealthy men. Most hunter-gatherer societies have very little in the way of accumulated resources and private property. Whether this accurately reflects the ancestral environment is controversial; hunter-gatherers have, over the last few millennia, been shoved off of rich land into marginal habitats and thus may not, in this respect, be representative of our ancestors. But if indeed all men in the ancestral environment were about equally affluent (that is, not very), women may be innately attuned not so much to a man's wealth as to his social status; among hunter-gatherers, status often translates into power—influence over the divvying up of resources, such as meat after a big kill. In modern societies, in any event, wealth, status, and power often go hand in hand, and seem to make an attractive package in the eyes of the average woman.

Ambition and industry also seem to strike many women as auspicious—and Buss found that this pattern, too, is broadly international. Of course, ambition and industriousness are things a female might look for even in a low-MPI species, as indices of genetic quality. Not so, however, for her assessment of the male's willingness to invest. A female in a high-MPI species may seek signs of generosity, trustworthiness, and, especially, an enduring commitment to her in particular. It is a truism that flowers and other tokens of affection are more prized by women than by men.

Why should women be so suspicious of men? After all, aren't males in a high-MPI species designed to settle down, buy a house, and mow the lawn every weekend? Here arises the first problem with terms like love and pair bonding. Males in high-MPI species are, paradoxically, capable of greater treachery than males in low-MPI species. For the "optimal male course," as Trivers noted, is a "mixed strategy." Even if long-term investment is their main aim, seduction and abandonment can make genetic sense, provided it doesn't take too much, in time and other resources, from the offspring in which the male does invest. The bastard youngsters may thrive even without paternal investment; they may, for that matter, attract investment from some poor sap who is under the impression that they're his. So males in a high-MPI species should, in theory, be ever alert for opportunistic sex.

Of course, so should males in a low-MPI species. But this doesn't amount to exploitation, since the female has no chance of getting much more from another male. In a high-MPI species, she does, and a failure to get it from any male can be quite costly.

The result of these conflicting aims—the female aversion to exploitation, the male affinity for exploiting—is an evolutionary arms race. Natural selection may favor males that are good at deceiving females about their future devotion and favor females that are good at spotting deception; and the better one side gets, the better the other side gets. It's a vicious spiral of treachery and wariness—even if, in a sufficiently subtle species, it may assume the form of soft kisses, murmured endearments, and ingenuous demurrals.

At least it's a vicious spiral in theory. Moving beyond all this theoretical speculation and into the realm of concrete evidence— actually glimpsing the seamy underside of kisses and endearments—is tricky. Evolutionary psychologists have made only meager progress. True, one study found that males, markedly more than females, report depicting themselves as more kind, sincere, and trustworthy than they actually are. But that sort of false advertising may be only half the story, and the other half is much harder to get at. As Trivers didn't note in his 1972 paper, but did note four years later, one effective way to deceive someone is to believe what you're saying. In this context, that means being blinded by love—to feel deep affection for a woman who, after a few months of sex, may grow markedly less adorable. This, indeed, is the great moral escape hatch for men who persist in a pattern of elaborate seduction and crisp, if anguished, abandonment. "I loved her at the time," they can movingly recall, if pressed on the matter.

This isn't to say that a man's affections are chronically delusional, that every swoon is tactical self-deception. Sometimes men do make good on their vows of eternal devotion. Besides, in one sense, an out-and-out lie is impossible. There's no way of knowing in mid-swoon, either at the conscious or unconscious level, what the future holds. Maybe some more genetically auspicious mate will show up three years from now; then again, maybe the man will suffer some grave misfortune that renders him unmarketable, turning his spouse into his only reproductive hope. But, in the face of uncertainty as to how much commitment lies ahead, natural selection would likely err on the side of exaggeration, so long as it makes sex more likely and doesn't bring counterbalancing costs.

There probably would have been some such costs in the intimate social environment of our evolution. Leaving town, or at least village, wasn't a simple matter back then, so blatantly false promises might quickly catch up with a man—in the form of lowered credibility or even shortened life span; the anthropological archives contain stories about men who take vengeance on behalf of a betrayed sister or daughter.

Also, the supply of potentially betrayable women wasn't nearly what it is in the modern world. As Donald Symons has noted, in the average hunter-gatherer society, every man who can snare a wife does, and virtually every woman is married by the time she's fertile. There probably was no thriving singles scene in the ancestral environment, except one involving adolescent girls during the fruitless phase between first menstruation and fertility. Symons believes that the lifestyle of the modern philandering bachelor—seducing and abandoning available women year after year after year, without making any of them targets for ongoing investment—is not a distinct, evolved sexual strategy. It is just what happens when you take the male mind, with its preference for varied sex partners, and put it in a big city replete with contraceptive technology.

Still, even if the ancestral environment wasn't full of single women sitting alone after one-night stands muttering "Men are scum," there were reasons to guard against males who exaggerate commitment. Divorce can happen in hunter-gatherer societies; men do up and leave after fathering a child or two, and may even move to another village. And polygamy is often an option. A man may vow that his bride will stay at the center of his life, and then, once married, spend half his time trying to woo another wife—or, worse still, succeed, and divert resources away from his first wife's children. Given such prospects, a woman's genes would be well served by her early and careful scrutiny of a man's likely devotion. In any event, the gauging of a man's commitment does seem to be part of human female psychology; and male psychology does seem inclined to sometimes encourage a false reading.

That male commitment is in limited supply—that each man has only so much time and energy to invest in offspring—is one reason females in our species defy stereotypes prevalent elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Females in low-MPl species—that is, in most sexual species—have no great rivalry with one another. Even if dozens of them have their hearts set on a single, genetically optimal male, he can, and gladly will, fulfill their dreams; copulation doesn't take long. But in a high-MPI species such as ours, where a female's ideal is to monopolize her dream mate—steer his social and material resources toward her offspring—competition with other females is inevitable. In other words: high male parental investment makes sexual selection work in two directions at once. Not only have males evolved to compete for scarce female eggs; females have evolved to compete for scarce male investment.

Sexual selection, to be sure, seems to have been more intense among men than among women. And it has favored different sorts of traits in the two. After all, the things women do to gain investment from men are different from the things men do to gain sexual access to women. (Women aren't—to take the most obvious example— designed for physical combat with each other, as men are.) The point is simply that, whatever each sex must do to get what it wants from the other, both sexes should be inclined to do it with zest. Females in a high-MPI species will hardly be passive and guileless. And they will sometimes be the natural enemies of one another.

WHAT DO MEN WANT?

It would be misleading to say that males in a high-male-parental-investment species are selective about mates, but in theory they are at least selectively selective. They will, on the one hand, have sex with just about anything that moves, given an easy chance, like males in a low-MPI species. On the other hand, when it comes to finding a female for a long-term joint venture, discretion makes sense; males can undertake only so many ventures over a lifetime, so the genes that the partner brings to the project—genes for robustness, brains, whatever—are worth scrutinizing.

The distinction was nicely drawn by a study in which both men and women were asked about the minimal level of intelligence they would accept in a person they were "dating." The average response, for both male and female, was: average intelligence. They were also asked how smart a person would have to be before they would consent to sexual relations. The women said: Oh, in that case, markedly above average. The men said: Oh, in that case, markedly below average.

Otherwise, the responses of male and female moved in lockstep. A partner they were "steadily dating" would have to be much smarter than average, and a marriageable partner would have to be smarter still. This finding, published in 1990, confirmed a prediction Trivers had made in his 1972 paper on parental investment. In a high-MPI species, he wrote, "a male would be selected to differentiate between a female he will only impregnate and a female with whom he will also raise young. Toward the former he should be more eager for sex and less discriminating in choice of sex partner than the female toward him, but toward the latter he should be about as discriminating as she toward him."

As Trivers knew, the nature of the discrimination, if not its intensity, should still differ between male and female. Though both seek general genetic quality, tastes may in other ways diverge. Just as women have special reason to focus on a man's ability to provide resources, men have special reason to focus on the ability to produce babies. That means, among other things, caring greatly about the age of a potential mate, since fertility declines until menopause, when it falls off abruptly. The last thing evolutionary psychologists would expect to find is that a plainly postmenopausal woman is sexually attractive to the average man. They don't find it. (According to Bron-islaw Malinowski, Trobriand Islanders considered sex with an old woman "indecorous, ludicrous, and unaesthetic.") Even before menopause, age matters, especially in a long-term mate; the younger a woman, the more children she can bear. In every one of Buss's thirty-seven cultures, males preferred younger mates (and females preferred older mates).

The importance of youth in a female mate may help explain the extreme male concern with physical attractiveness in a spouse (a concern that Buss also documented in all thirty-seven cultures). The generic "beautiful woman"—yes, she has actually been assembled, in a study that collated the seemingly diverse tastes of different men— has large eyes and a small nose. Since her eyes will look smaller and her nose larger as she ages, these components of "beauty" are also marks of youth, and thus of fertility. Women can afford to be more open-minded about looks; an oldish man, unlike an oldish woman, is probably fertile.

Another reason for the relative flexibility of females on the question of facial attractiveness may be that a woman has other things to (consciously or unconsciously) worry about. Such as: Will he provide for the kids? When people see a beautiful woman with an ugly man, they typically assume he has lots of money or status. Researchers have actually gone to the trouble of showing that people make this inference, and that the inference is often correct.

When it comes to assessing character—to figuring out if you can trust a mate—a male's discernment may again differ from a female's, because the kind of treachery that threatens his genes is different from the kind that threatens hers. Whereas the woman's natural fear is the withdrawal of his investment, his natural fear is that the investment is misplaced. Not long for this world are the genes of a man who spends his time rearing children who aren't his. Trivers noted in 1972 that, in a species with high male parental investment and internal fertilization, "adaptations should evolve to help guarantee that the female's offspring are also his own."

All of this may sound highly theoretical—and of course it is. But this theory, unlike the theory about male love sometimes being finely crafted self-delusion, is readily tested. Years after Trivers suggested that anticuckoldry technology might be built into men, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson found some. They realized that if indeed a man's great Darwinian peril is cuckoldry, and a woman's is desertion, then male and female jealousy should differ. Male jealousy should focus on sexual infidelity, and males should be quite unforgiving of it; a female, though she'll hardly applaud a partner's extracurricular activities, since they consume time and divert resources, should be more concerned with emotional infidelity—the sort of magnetic commitment to another woman that could eventually lead to a much larger diversion of resources.

These predictions have been confirmed—by eons of folk wisdom and, over the past few decades, by considerable data. What drives men craziest is the thought of their mate in bed with another man; they don't dwell as much as women do on any attendant emotional attachment, or the possible loss of the mate's time and attention. Wives, for their part, do find the sheerly sexual infidelity of husbands traumatic, and do respond harshly to it, but the long-run effect is often a self-improvement campaign: lose weight, wear makeup, "win him back." Husbands tend to respond to infidelity with rage; and even after it subsides, they often have trouble contemplating a continued relationship with the infidel.

Looking back, Daly and Wilson saw that this basic pattern had been recorded (though not stressed) by psychologists before the theory of parental investment came along to explain it. But evolutionary psychologists have now confirmed the pattern in new and excruciating detail. David Buss placed electrodes on men and women and had them envision their mates doing various disturbing things. When men imagined sexual infidelity, their heart rates took leaps of a magnitude typically induced by three successive cups of coffee. They sweated. Their brows wrinkled. When they imagined instead a budding emotional attachment, they calmed down, though not quite to their normal level. For women, things were reversed: envisioning emotional infidelity—redirected love, not supplementary sex—brought the deeper physiological distress.

The logic behind male jealousy isn't what it used to be. These days some adulterous women use contraception and thus don't, in fact, dupe their husbands into spending two decades shepherding another man's genes. But the weakening of the logic doesn't seem to have weakened the jealousy. For the average husband, the fact that his wife inserted a diaphragm before copulating with her tennis instructor will not be a major source of consolation.

The classic example of an adaptation that has outlived its logic is the sweet tooth. Our fondness for sweetness was designed for an environment in which fruit existed but candy didn't. Now that a sweet tooth can bring obesity, people try to control their cravings, and sometimes they succeed. But their methods are usually roundabout, and few people find them easy; the basic sense that sweetness feels good is almost unalterable (except by, say, repeatedly pairing a sweet taste with a painful shock). Similarly, the basic impulse toward jealousy is very hard to erase. Still, people can muster some control over the impulse, and, moreover, can muster much control over some forms of its expression, such as violence, given a sufficiently powerful reason. Prison, for example.

WHAT ELSE DO WOMEN WANT?

Before further exploring the grave imprint that cuckoldry has left on the male psyche, we might ask why it would exist. Why would a woman cheat on a man, if that won't increase the number of her progeny—and if, moreover, she thus risks incurring the wrath, and losing the investment, of her mate? What reward could justify such a gamble? There are more possible answers to this question than you might imagine.

First, there is what biologists call "resource extraction." If female humans, like female hanging flies, can get gifts in exchange for sex, then the more sex partners, the more gifts. Our closest primate relatives act out this logic. Female bonobos are often willing to provide sex in exchange for a hunk of meat. Among common chimpanzees, the food-for-sex swap is less explicit but is evident; male chimps are more likely to give meat to a female when she exhibits the red vaginal swelling that signifies ovulation.

Human females, of course, don't advertise their ovulation. One theory about this "cryptic ovulation" sees it as an adaptation designed to expand the period during which they can extract resources. Men may lavish gifts on them well before or past ovulation and receive sex in return, blissfully oblivious to the fruitlessness of their conquest. Nisa, a woman in a !Kung San hunter-gatherer village, spoke candidly with an anthropologist about the material rewards of multiple sex partners. "One man can give you very little. One man gives you only one kind of food to eat. But when you have lovers, one brings you something and another brings you something else. One comes at night with meat, another with money, another with beads. Your husband also does things and gives them to you."

Another reason women might copulate with more than one man—and another advantage of concealed ovulation—is to leave several men under the impression that they might be the father of particular offspring. Across primate species, there is a rough correlation between a male's kindness to youngsters and the chances that he is their father. The dominant male gorilla, with his celestial sexual stature, can rest pretty much assured that the youngsters in his troop are his; and, although not demonstrative by comparison with a human father, he is indulgent of them and reliably protective. At the other end of the spectrum, male langur monkeys kill infants sired by others as a kind of sexual icebreaker, a prelude to pairing up with the (former) mother. What better way to return her to ovulation—by putting an emphatic end to her breast-feeding—and to focus her energies on the offspring to come?

Anyone tempted to launch into a sweeping indictment of langur morality should first note that infanticide on grounds of infidelity has been acceptable in various human societies. In two societies men have been known to demand, upon marrying women with a past, that their babies be killed. And among the Ache hunter-gatherers of Paraguay, men sometimes collectively decide to kill a newly fatherless child. Even leaving murder aside, life can be hard on children without a devoted father. Ache children raised by stepfathers after their biological fathers die are half as likely to live to age fifteen as children whose parents stay alive and together. For a woman in the ancestral environment, then, the benefits of multiple sex partners could have ranged from their not killing her youngster to their defending or otherwise aiding her youngster.

This logic doesn't depend on the sex partners' consciously mulling it over. Male gorillas and langurs, like the Trobriand Islanders as depicted by Malinowski, are not conscious of biological paternity. Still, the behavior of males in all three cases reflects an implicit recognition. Genes making males unconsciously sensitive to cues that certain youngsters may or may not be carrying their genes have flourished. A gene that says, or at least whispers, "Be nice to children if you've had a fair amount of sex with their mothers" will do better than a gene that says, "Steal food from children even if you were having regular sex with their mothers months before birth."

This "seeds of confusion" theory of female promiscuity has been championed by the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. Hrdy has described herself as a feminist sociobiologist, and she may take a more than scientific interest in arguing that female primates tend to be "highly competitive . . . sexually assertive individuals." Then again, male Darwinians may get a certain thrill from saying males are built for lifelong sex-a-thons. Scientific theories spring from many-sources. The only question in the end is whether they work.

Both of these theories of female promiscuity—"resource extraction" and "seeds of confusion"—could in principle apply to a mate-less woman as well as a married one. Indeed, both would make sense for a species with little or no male parental investment, and thus may help explain the extreme promiscuity of female chimpanzees and bonobos. But there is a third theory that grows uniquely out of the dynamics of male parental investment, and thus has special application to wives: the "best of both worlds" theory.

In a high-MPI species, the female seeks two things: good genes and high ongoing investment. She may not find them in the same package. One solution would be to trick a devoted but not especially brawny or brainy mate into raising the offspring of another male. Again, cryptic ovulation would come in handy, as a treachery facilitator. It's fairly easy for a man to keep rivals from impregnating his mate if her brief phase of fertility is plainly visible; but if she appears equally fertile all month, surveillance becomes a problem. This is exactly the confusion a female would want to create if her goal is to draw investment from one man and genes from another. Of course, the female may not consciously "want" this "goal." And she may not be consciously aware of when she's ovulating. But at some level she may be keeping track.

Theories involving so much subconscious subterfuge may sound too clever by half, especially to people not steeped in the cynical logic of natural selection. But there is some evidence that women are more sexually active around ovulation. And two studies have found that women going to a singles bar wear more jewelry and makeup when near ovulation. These adornments, it seems, have the advertising value of a chimpanzee's pink genital swelling, attracting a number of men for the woman to choose from. And these decked-out women did indeed tend to have more physical contact with men in the course of the evening.

Another study, by the British biologists R. Robin Baker and Mark Bellis, found that women who cheat on their mates are more likely to do so around ovulation. This suggests that often the secret lover's genes, not just his resources, are indeed what they're after.

Whatever the reason(s) women cheat on their mates (or, as biologists value-neutrally put it, have "extra-pair copulations"), there's no denying that they do. Blood tests show that in some urban areas more than one fourth of the children may be sired by someone other than the father of record. And even in a !Kung San village, which, like the ancestral environment, is so intimate as to make covert liaison tricky, one in fifty children was found to have misassigned paternity. Female infidelity appears to have a long history.

Indeed, if female infidelity weren't a long-standing part of life in this species, why would distinctively maniacal male jealousy have evolved? At the same time, that men so often invest heavily in the children of their mates suggests that cuckoldry hasn't been rampant; if it had, genes encouraging this investment would long ago have run into a dead end. The minds of men are an evolutionary record of the past behavior of women. And vice versa.

If a "psychological" record seems too vague, consider a more plainly physiological bit of data: human testicles—or, more exactly, the ratio of average testes weight to average male body weight. Chimpanzees and other species with high relative testes weights have "multimale breeding systems," in which females are quite promiscuous. Species with low relative testes weights are either monogamous (gibbons, for example) or polygynous (gorillas), with one male monopolizing several families. (Polygamous is the more general term, denoting a male or a female that has more than one mate.) The explanation is simple. When females commonly breed with many different males, male genes can profit by producing lots of semen for their transportation. Which male gets his DNA into a given egg may be a question of sheer volume, as competing hordes of sperm do subterranean battle. A species' testicles are thus a record of its females' sexual adventure over the ages. In our species, relative testes weight falls between that of the chimpanzee and the gorilla, suggesting that women, while not nearly as wild as chimpanzee females, are, by nature, somewhat adventurous.

Of course, adventurous doesn't mean unfaithful. Maybe women in the ancestral environment had their wild, unattached periods— during which fairly weighty testicles paid off for men—as well as their devoted, monogamous periods. Then again, maybe not. Consider a truer record of female infidelity: variable sperm density. You might think that the number of sperm cells in a husband's ejaculate would depend only on how long it's been since he last had sex. Wrong. According to work by Baker and Bellis, the quantity of sperm depends heavily on the amount of time a man's mate has been out of his sight lately. The more chances a woman has had to collect sperm from other males, the more profusely her mate sends in his own troops. Again: that natural selection designed such a clever weapon is evidence of something for the weapon to combat.

It is also evidence that natural selection is fully capable of designing equally clever psychological weapons, ranging from furious jealousy to the seemingly paradoxical tendency of some men to be sexually aroused by the thought of their mate in bed with another man. Or, more generally: the tendency of men to view women as possessions. In a 1992 paper called "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Chattel," Wilson and Daly wrote that "men lay claim to particular women as songbirds lay claim to territories, as lions lay claim to a kill, or as people of both sexes lay claim to valuables. . . . Referring to man's view of woman as 'proprietary' is more than a metaphor: Some of the same mental algorithms are apparently activated in the rharital and mercantile spheres."

The theoretical upshot of all this is another evolutionary arms race. As men grow more attuned to the threat of cuckoldry, women should get better at convincing a man that their adoration borders on awe, their fidelity on the saintly. And they may partly convince themselves too, just for good measure. Indeed, given the calamitous fallout from infidelity uncovered—likely desertion by the offended male, and possible violence—female self-deception may be finely honed. It could be adaptive for a married woman to not feel chronically concerned with sex, even if her unconscious mind is keeping track of prospects and will notify her when ardor is warranted.

[Bold mine. I'll stop here as this is going beyond fair use. But the whole book is really fascinating and deserves a spot on your bookshelf. -g]